WASHINGTON — Five little words were all it took to send Rep. Joyce Beatty over the moon.

When President Barack Obama uttered the phrase “when women succeed, America succeeds” during his
State of the Union address in January, the Jefferson Township Democrat launched into a
mini-celebration on the House floor. Female Democratic lawmakers high-fived her.

It was a moment rich in triumph; Beatty had suggested one day earlier to two White House aides
that Obama utter those words during a meeting between female House Democrats and White House staff
members.

“Today, women make up about half our workforce, but they still make 77 cents for every dollar a
man earns,” Obama said. “That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment. Women deserve equal pay
for equal work. … I firmly believe when women succeed, America succeeds.”

But how those words will be met with action during Obama’s year of action is to be seen.

Obama can stake a claim to some action on the pay-equity issue. The Lilly Ledbetter Act — the
first substantive legislation that Obama signed when he became president — loosened restrictions on
when women could sue regarding pay discrimination. It allows pay-discrimination lawsuits within 180
days of each new paycheck that was discriminatory.

And in Congress, the Paycheck Fairness Act — an update to the Equal Pay Act, which was passed
more than 50 years ago and intended to eliminate pay discrimination between men and women — remains
stalled in Congress, although Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, a co-sponsor of the bill, said he expects
a Senate vote on it this year.

Last week, Obama held a White House meeting focused on the gender wage gap. The White House
Council of Economic Advisors reported that 75 percent of women between the ages of 25 and 54 are in
the workforce — up from 50 percent in 1970.

Those involved in the issue say Obama could match his rhetoric with action immediately by
issuing an executive order that would allow federal workers to talk about their wages — allowing
them to compare whether one is paid significantly less for the same duties — without fear of being
fired for doing so.

“It’s something he can do right now,” said Lisa Maatz, a northeastern Ohio native who is now
vice president of government relations for the progressive American Association of University
Women. “Quite frankly, when the federal government is acting as a model employer, oftentimes, other
industries copy what they do to stay competitive. There are all kinds of reasons why he should do
this.”

The 77 percent statistic simplifies a lot of issues, said Janice Shaw Crouse, a senior fellow at
the Beverly LaHaye Institute, the research group for the conservative Concerned Women for America.
She said that many women might be paid less because they’re given additional flexibility, might
have taken time off to raise children or have to work fewer hours, or might be inclined toward
traditionally lower-paying careers.

“It’s a great political football — the whole war-on-women narrative,” Shaw said. “But Obama
knows better than that. Everyone knows better than that.”

The statistic Obama used in his State of the Union address — that women make 77 cents for every
$1 men own — is accurate but incredibly nuanced, said Ariane Hegewisch, a study director for the
Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a research group focused on women’s issues.

The statistic also is largely unchanged: Women were paid 77 percent of what men were paid both
in 2002 and 2012. In Ohio in 2012, median pay for men was $46,789, compared with women’s median pay
of $35,984 — meaning that women earned 77 percent of what men did, a mirror to the national
average.

The 77 percent statistic is based on the Census Bureau’s tracking of annual pay. But other
federal statistics differ. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tracks weekly wages, found
that women earn 82 cents for every dollar men make. That statistic does not include the
self-employed but does include some workers left out of the Census Bureau’s account, Hegewisch
said.

She said that only about 40 percent of the wage gap can be explained by discrimination. The gap
also can be explained by how society values certain types of work compared with others.

“It’s all about the market economy,” Maatz said, saying that in some cases, groundskeepers — who
traditionally have been men — are paid more than first-year teachers, who are more often women.

Maatz said that among college-educated women, the wage gap is also almost immediate. Her
association did a study that found that among full-time workers one year out of college, women were
paid 83 percent of what their male counterparts were.

Others say that Obama’s focus on the issue is a bald-faced attempt to win women’s votes in the
2014 midterm elections.

Some point to the issue in his own administration: An analysis of White House payroll data by
the conservative American Enterprise Institute found that the median annual pay of 228 female
employees is $65,000 this year, compared with $73,729 for the 231 men on the staff.

For Beatty, whose words were worked into the State of the Union, it’s time for something to
happen on the nation’s gender wage gap.

“We don’t want women to be a casualty. We don’t want them to be a pre-existing condition like
you talk about in health care,” she said. “We want them to have equal pay for equal work.”